Pizza

Every time I see the commercial for Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites Pizza, I taste a little bit of throw-up in the back of my throat. “Let’s ring a grease-soaked rag with two dozen cheese filled testicles. Give the people what they want!”

Bullshit, I say. I’m not going to end up looking like the guy in the Tax Masters commercial.

Fortunately, the one thing I make on the grill that blows away the ratio of “easiest to make” versus “most impressive to guests” is pizza. It’s a method I’ve been tinkering with for years, but it was only last summer that I feel like I really nailed it.

As much as I prefer to make things from scratch, I haven’t found a home made pizza dough recipe I like as much as the dough ball I can buy at PCC Natural Markets by The Essential Baking Company. At around $5/dough ball, it’ll make you two good sized pizzas.

The toppings don’t matter in this exercise; it’s all about the attention paid to the crust, and whether you buy a dough ball from a market or are making it at home in a mixer or a bread machine from scratch, the same rules apply:

1: Make it Retarded

If you leave the dough out on the counter all afternoon, you’ll end up with a yeasty beach ball, and even after punching it down it will be too airy to use right away. Airy dough, in my experience, separates once it hits the grill and you end up with a pita bread instead of a pizza crust. No good.

Combat this by letting the dough only double in size and then retarding it by putting it in the fridge. Retarding the dough means stopping the yeast from eating the sugars and making air bubbles.

2: Use Protection

Grills get hot because of the fire, and the grates get very hot because they’re made of metal. Luckily, it doesn’t take much to mitigate these factors: roll the dough out onto a piece of parchment paper before putting it on the grill. (More on this in a bit.)

3: Slow it Down

Neapolitan-style pizza is cooked at a crematorium-level temperature inside well-insulated ovens made of brick or stone. That’s why when you order a pizza at a place like Tutta Bella your pie is done in minutes, so you don’t have to listen to the kids screaming at the table next to you for one second longer than necessary.

The upper temperature of a typical backyard grill tops out at around 600*, so to get a good char we’ve got to use some trickery in the form of cooking both sides separately.

A Really Good Pizza Cooked on an Outdoor Grill

As you’re warming up the grill, cook the meat and vegetable toppings you want to use. Peppers, onions olives and Isernios sausage works especially well. Or you could go with the Jalapeño and Pineapple maneuver.

Once that’s done, roll that dough out into your crust with your hands or a floured-up rolling pin, then carefully place it onto a sheet of parchment paper. Stab it with a fork all over. You don’t need to use any oil at all for this, just put it on the paper dry then carefully slide it from a cutting board onto a grill which has been heated to a steady 350* - 400*.

In about 8 minutes what you’ll have is one perfectly cooked side of a pizza crust. Scoop it from the grill and flip it over onto a cutting board, and discard the parchment paper.

Top the cooked side with your fixins, leaving the uncooked side facing the cutting board. Again: don’t cook the same side twice, or you’ll ruin everything, like you did that one year at Christmas.

Back onto the grill for another 6-8 minutes, or as long as it takes to melt the cheese. Pull it. Cut it. Done.

Or are you?

Here’s what you do if you’re me: once the pizza has been topped and is finishing off in the grill, melt a tablespoon of butter in a coffee mug in the microwave. When the pizza’s off the heat and on a cutting board in the kitchen, brush the outer inch of crust with a buttery pastry brush, and sprinkle it with some garlic salt.

That’s taking it to the next level. You could also skip this step if you hate things that are good.

A nice, thin-crust pizza full of flavor from a little bit of char and garlic salt, that isn’t soggy in the middle under the weight of your favorite toppings, cooked on a grill.

You should do this, if not for yourself, but to keep your friends from ordering “the testicle rag” from Pizza Hut.

Quesadillas

French bread that’s gone a little stale makes the best french toast, but it’s also true that days-old tortillas - even previously steamed ones - make the best quesadillas. Add to that the delicate char you can achieve on a grill, and what you get is a meal that puts to shame the version cooked in the microwave (and filled with Kraft Singles) you had as a kid.

There is a better way. And the process renders a meat delivery system that is as easy as it is delicious.

Why use stale tortillas? Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever used an entire package of tortillas for one meal - there are always leftovers unused. And the stale tortilla doesn’t lose anything in the taste department once you cook it on the grill; the advantage it brings to the process is in the ease of cooking.

Think of it this way: imagine filling an oxford work shirt with meat and cheese, and then flipping it over. It’s pretty difficult to do that without spilling meat and cheese all over the place, am I right? Now use some spray starch on that imaginary shirt until it’s stiff as a board. It would be much easier to flip that meat and cheese-filled shirt now, right? That’s the idea behind the slightly stale tortilla.

It’s spray-starched up, only naturally.

Butter up one side of each stale tortilla and put your cheese and toppings on the unbuttered side. Lately we’ve been going with diced-up leftover chicken (from cooking butterflied whole birds - but that’s a story for another post). Top with the other tortilla so that both unbuttered sides face out.

Keep your grill temperature at around 400, and using the biggest spatula you have gently scoot the uncooked quesadilla from it onto the grates. As you do this, try to imagine how difficult it would be to do so with a fresh tortilla. We laugh at those people.

About 4 minutes a side renders some nice grill marks without over-cooking them. Pull them off the heat and use a pizza cutter to cut ‘em into wedges.

It’s obvious that you’ll want to dip them into something so I’ll usually employ “Adam’s Top Secret Quesadilla Dip Recipe”. Here’s how you make it:

• Two big spoonfulls of salsa
• Two big spoonfulls of sour cream
• Stir

My favorite salsa of all time is made in Redmond, Washington, and it’s called Salsa de Rosa. Their website is colossally bad, probably because they’re spending all their time making fantastic salsa. You can get it at regional PCC and Whole Foods locations, which I recommend you do immediately.

Brisket

When people talk about smoking a brisket, they often speak in hyperbole about how difficult it is. “It’s the barbecue equivalent of climbing Mount Everest,” I’ve read.

This being my first time on such an exhibition, it should come as no surprise that I died at base camp.

I had such noble plans. I picked up some wood from a newly recommended butcher shop, Golden Steer. The guy behind the counter couldn’t have been nicer or more knowledgable. They had an entire aisle stocked with different kinds of wood: alder, hickory, apple, maple, peach, and pecan, and he was all too eager to take out a cigarette lighter to light up toothpick-sized samples for me to smell.

We spent several minutes essentially making BBQ incense before I made up my mind.

I decided on pecan, and I was out the door with a bag of split wood that would last me several smoking sessions, and that night I rubbed the brisket with yellow mustard and a blend of seasoning before putting it to bed in the refrigerator.

The proper ratio is an hour and a half of cook time for every pound of meat. At almost 6 pounds, I decided to get up at about 8 in the morning to make sure it would be done by supper.

It didn’t take long to realize that for all the effort I was willing to put in, I didn’t have the right grill, or right wood for this task. In short order, my morning became a nightmarish sequence of setting fires and then putting them out, over and over and over again.

My neighbors downwind endured my fallout for hours, a plume of smoke so dark at times I used a large fan to try to divert the smoke higher and away from their windows. The temperature inside the grill would spike signaling a fire, and once it was put out with a spray bottle of water the temperature would crash until the heat lit the wood once again.

I was making a camp fire on my porch, and it wasn’t going to work no matter how long I stuck with it.

I learned too late that my grill, a Weber Genesis, is really only able to smoke wood chips in either a smoker box or a foil packet. Logs just sit too close to the burner elements. What I ended up with was mostly inedible, a charred and dried out hunk of meat that embarrasses me as much as my middle school yearbook pictures. It was another failure, but I learned a lot in the process.

I’ll try for the brisket summit soon, but not before changing my game plan (and the type of wood I’ll be using). 

New Project: Bacon

Still stinging from the failure of the cured sausage experiment (and with the wine fridge I used to cure it still staring at me from the corner of the kitchen), I decided to embark on a new project from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie book that I couldn’t possibly fuck up: bacon.

I had an entire winter of successful pork belly experimentation, including the Momofuku pork belly buns I made on New Year’s Eve. I learned some things.

The belly is easy. The belly is forgiving. The belly is kind.

Ten days in the fridge curing in a solution made of brown sugar, maple syrup, and special pink salt rendered the once flabby belly firm and red.

A quick wash in the sink and a return to the fridge for a day to dry out on a baking sheet meant they were ready for the final step: 4 hours in the grill, impregnated with applewood smoke. That one day dry-out step is key, because during the time the meat dries out it also forms a tacky film which is critical for the smoke to stick to.

“Hot smoking” occurs around 200 degrees which, in a Weber Genesis, is an extremely difficult temperature to hold. It was here where I had the most problems: I needed to get the wood chips hot enough to smoke, while at the same time avoiding raising the temperature inside the grill high enough to actually cook the meat.

My strategy consisted of opening the lid and hitting the chips with a quick blast of all three burners on high to get them roasting, then turning two burners off completely and leaving the last one on the lowest temperature before closing the lid.

A few sessions of this (as well as a few Sessions of this) and what was once a light pink piece of meat was a deep mahogany color. 150* of internal temperature confirmed that it was “done”.

But even at this stage, the bacon isn’t cooked. With my sharpest knife I cut the meat into slices the thickness of seat belts, then it was into the pan while E made some buttermilk waffles.

I love the result; it’s sweet and smoky like the lit teacher you had a crush on in college. But here’s the thing: I like my bacon a little bolder and punchier, so next time I’m going to go with a more peppery mix of spice and smoke.

We’ll see what happens.

Day 31: Fail

There are a lot of obstacles that need to be successfully navigated to avoid dry sausage disaster, but perhaps the two most important are temperature and humidity.

Not long after the cure began the wine fridge where we were storing the salumi had to be moved from a spare bedroom into the garage. Because refrigerators are cooling appliances without the ability to heat, the temperature in the garage was not high enough for our purposes, and for a time the temperature in the box was 50-55*.

The reason this experiment failed was that we could not sustain the 60*F temperature and 70% humidity rule, and so last night the sausage was cut down and thrown away in a sad, stinking pile that smelled like gangrenous feet.

We plan to try again in another month when the garage is a little warmer and the fridge can do what it’s made to do: cool the box down to a constant 60*F.

Day 13: Aging nicely

“Look at that subtle reddish coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark…”

Day 7: Mold

Depending on what you read, the appearance of mold is either a natural process of making dry cured salami, or a harbinger of doom.

On day 4, the first small spots started appearing, but by day 7 the mold was flourishing.

That it appeared wasn’t surprising, but now we had to decide how to rid ourselves of it. Wiping the sausages down with a vinegar solution (1 part white vinegar, 4 parts water) was the consensus.

After giving the fridge a quick wipe down with some bleach solution, we put in a container of salt water slurry to better control the humidity inside.

Finally we rehung the now cleaned sausage and closed the door to the fridge. We will be monitoring the mold growth as the weeks press on.

Day 1: Making Soppressata, from the book “Charcuterie” by Ruhlman & Polcyn

Seattle is a sausage town.

If for no other reason, there’s “Armandino’s Salumi” downtown, the epicenter of cured meats in the United States. There are also many other restaurants to get a great charcuterie board around the city.

But what if you wanted to make it at home? What then?

“Charcuterie” by Ruhlman & Polcyn is a book about making sausage at home, and it inspired us to try, in spite of such dangers of bowel-shaking illness and death. Nothing risked, nothing gained though - you could get killed walking your doggie!

Let’s get started.

First we mixed the dry ingredients and set them off to the side:

In the pyrex is the Bactoferm F-RM-52, a culture used in dry curing.

Next we soaked the casings. We chose fresh pig intestine, purchased from Fischer Meats in Issaquah, Washington:

They come on a length of plastic that must be removed before using.

The act of removing 20 feet of pig intestine from the plastic is a little like unrolling the world’s largest condom. Add to this that it is an easily twisted mess of a length. All the twists must be removed, because the insides have to be rinsed with water.

The grind began with the chilled back fat, followed by the pork shoulder.

The KitchenAid grinding attachment made quick work of the grind, leaving us with a nice, uniform result.

Next we mixed the fat, ground, and dry ingredients along with the Bactoferm cultures and wet ingredients.

With the casing rinsed, and put onto the sausage filling attachment (now rolling ON the world’s largest condom), we were ready to fill.

Filling had to be done as a team. Tyson was on “Team Grind” and Adam was on “Team Fill”. Scott was on “Team Smirk”. (Beer was consumed through a straw, so as not to contaminate our hands)

It wasn’t difficult to fill the casings, as they do a pretty good job of determining when they are filled enough to move along. Every eight inches or so they would be twisted off for the next one.

The filling was the fastest part of this process. Our recipe said we’d get 8 sausages out of it, but we ended up with 9. This included “The John Holmes” version at the very end.

The finished sausages were hung in a wine fridge we found on Craigslist for $50. 12 hours of initial “room temperature” curing is followed by the weeks of the temperature and humidity stable closed door curing.